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The river of time The river of time
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Language and nation Language and nation
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Bibliography Bibliography
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20 Historiography: Nicholas Trevet’s Transnational History
Get accessSuzanne Conklin Akbari is Professor of Medieval Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study and was educated at Johns Hopkins and Columbia. She has written books on optics and allegory (Seeing Through the Veil, University of Toronto Press, 2004) and European views of Islam and the Orient (Idols in the East, Cornell Universit Press, 2009), and edited collections on travel literature (Marco Polo, University of Toronto Press, 2008), Mediterranean Studies (A Sea of Languages, University of Toronto Press, 2013), and somatic histories (The Ends of the Body, University of Toronto Press, 2013). She is completing a monograph titled Small Change: Metaphor and Metamorphosis in Chaucer and Christine de Pizan and working on a project on premodern ideas of periodization as seen in universal histories, maps, and diagrams.
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Published:02 September 2020
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Abstract
This chapter addresses Chaucer’s chief model for the writing of universal history: the early fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman chronicle of Nicholas Trevet. The first section sketches out the overall nature of Trevet’s world history, indicating its scope and showing what view it presents of English national identity, especially in terms of genealogical descent and territorial claims. It then turns to the Constance narrative that provided a model for the Man of Law’s Tale, illustrating how Trevet’s version highlights the role of language in the establishment of national identity, and in the mediating of fundamental changes in that national identity. Selected other passages in Trevet’s work also illustrate the role of language in articulating the boundaries that separate nations and, sometimes, bring them together. The chapter closes by identifying what it is that Trevet’s historical vision offers readers of Chaucer’s histories, such as Troilus or the Knight’s Tale: namely, a capacious temporal scope that makes room for a plural vision of multiple historical contexts—biblical, apostolic, Trojan, Roman, Theban, British, Saxon, and English.
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